As I'm sure many of you have, I've been aware of Bitcoin for a few years now. Rob Myers did a very interesting series of pieces not too long ago based on live feeds of bitcoin transactions (http://robmyers.org/blockchain-aesthetics/). I've been experimenting with these same sources (http://pallthayer.dyndns.org/harmoney/) and have come to consider the nature of web-based art when it comes to monetary value. This has always been a tricky subject. Perhaps bitcoin is the answer. The open nature of bitcoin would make it possible to require bitcoin transactions to 'engage' with web-based art... perhaps even requiring a donation to enact the work. Just a thought.

Rhizome has long held on to this belief that the discussion gravitated away due to the emergence of social sites but that's not right. I remember when I first discovered Rhizome. It was very liberating to discover that there were people all over the world involved in the same sort of practice that I was discovering... and they were sharing ideas, comments, work. It was great. Posts and works would get pulled from the list and published on the front page. There was an encouraging dynamic to it. Then something happened. Rhizome stopped publishing things from the list and was more or less just pulling stuff from other websites and posting that to their front page. They called it "re-blogging". That was what killed Rhizome. They stopped paying attention to their community and therefore the community stopped being a community.